Light from the Sea by Jane Carswell

Main Body

My hosts have gone, with laden cars and kind smiles, and left me their house for the weekend. I carry my bags into a nest of warmth, harvest of a string of sunny days. The property runs helter-skelter down through trees from Royal Terrace to Reed Street. Dry and bleached like driftwood, the 70s house perches where this South Island town, small but proud, rises from its strip by the sea to the hills beyond.

From a window nearly three times as long as I am I look down on Ōamaru’s settled modesty and on the sea. My own home further north is too far from the sea. Happy now by its side, I can’t take my eyes off it.

Unpacking forgotten, I watch, at the right-hand end of the bay, the sea breaking over rocks. The water’s edge along the remainder of the wide bay is hidden from sight, and there’s no sign of ebb and flow on the unbroken expanse of water. The surface shimmers, the light flickering like a play of knives, but its depths are still. The sea is going nowhere; it has taken up its place watching the town.

A procession of cars from the north, trucks and trailers among them like larger beads on a string, moves across my line of sight. Some of the trucks will be bound for Dunedin, and I almost envy them their drive southwards over narrowing roads where intimate hills crowd closer.

But I don’t want to move from this window.

Below me, the hillside garden is sunlit and strung with bird wing and song.

Eventually I leave a note and key out for the plumber who’s promised to fix the header tank, walk along Royal Terrace and turn down a street so steep there are handrails along one footpath. I want to find out if these roads that run down from the hills simply dive into the sea, as they seem to from here.

On one of these seaward routes lies the cheese factory with its attached shop selling deftly wrapped wedges, blocks and rounds with dramatic names. I sample a forceful blue cheese, promise the young assistant I’ll be back, and walk out from smart international marketing into small town New Zealand again, broad streets almost empty—just a few casually parked down-to-earth cars, a child wobbling on a bike, marigolds poking through paling fences, wind-borne fish and chips paper scuffing the road.

I stop on the footpath as a ute backs out of a driveway. The driver throws me an uncertain but friendly hello through his open window. Everyone here knows if you’re a stranger.

A number of the small houses on the roads leading to the sea are waiting for something to happen to them. There are signs of vision in their yards— rubble and rubbish from things pulled down, small stacks of hopeful timber, patches of slightly newer colour on peeling weatherboard. But something has proved too hard or too expensive; or maybe the dream just died. Developers might move in here some day, but I doubt if this neighbourhood, so much vitality in its intentions, would take kindly to a make-over.

These roads, I find, end some distance from the sea; you can’t see that from the window on the hill. They feed into Humber Street which, separated from the railway line by a low wall, skirts the bay. I remember from my childhood this stretch of the train trip to Dunedin, how the companionship of the sea was given and taken away several times as we ate up the miles between Tīmaru and Ōamaru. Here in the great open arm of the bay the richness of the sea again drew in close to the train before it puffed sootily on into the hills toward my grandparents. The tops of the rails gleam under the sun like swords—the same rails that I, carefully dressed for visiting my respectable Scottish Grandma, used to travel over.

But now the rails are bedded in fresh gravel and there’s an air of modern efficiency around the tracks. The old train trips had their own charms: listening to the rich chuff of the engine; looking for glimpses of its black might as we swept around a bend; the man with no top teeth who came on south of Tīmaru selling magazines I wasn’t allowed to read. But I don’t remember efficiency—or inefficiency for that matter. It wasn’t really an issue then.

There can’t be many things more eerily empty than the platform of a deserted railway station. Here the wind whistles through doorways built to the scale of thriving North Otago business, and spiders lurk in the corners of smeary windows. Outside, the iron roof looks as though you could crumble it in your fist, but the wooden framing and finials have been newly painted. The Union Jack flies above. I expect it to stir old loyalties in me, but it flaps uncertainly, flimsy and faded, all jaunty style lost to southern wind and weather.

I walk along the sea wall next to the rail yards. On the other side of the road is a featureless sprawl of auto service and supply companies. The men and boys working outside are passionately engaged in what they’re doing, and I recognise the symptoms of the in-love-with-engines syndrome. Here in the yards, I know, is true love.

Before I turn for the hills, I walk through the Historic Precinct; it’s one of the things you’re supposed to do while you’re here. I wander slowly between old harbourside buildings composed and still potent; their tenants guarding Tyne Street’s tradition of proud craft and trade. Creamy light from the local stone here bathes a street that trumpets both architectural elegance and civic utility. Born into a more diffident and rootless age, I feel the persuasive atmosphere of those days of high-stepping, high-busted Victorian confidence and prosperity; these broad-shouldered buildings breathe satisfaction with themselves and buoyant faith in the society that raised them.

Tour groups like this area: cultures of doubt don’t have the same appeal.

The wild yells of some boys, as they scoot around a corner, suggest: ‘We’re tough; look at us and watch out’. But their faces are open and trendy gear doesn’t seem compulsory. I see no-one plugged into sound systems as they saunter along on the flat or trudge up the hills, but their shouts make bold music on the wind. They all say hello as they pass. One grins as he jogs past me up Nen Street.

‘It’s easier if you run’ he calls back.

Back at the house on the hill, I lean against a cooling wall and look out over the garden and the glimpses of the sea beyond. A line of blackbirds must be strung like Christmas lights along the trees of these hillsides; their songs chime in from varying distances like well-recorded chamber music.

Out of the kitchen window I look down on a neighbouring section. There’s no-one at home, but someone has put, in front of the door, a cardboard carton filled with a fat tuffet of fine blankets, the satin-bound ends trailing on the sunny, unpainted porch. Perched on top is their mushroom cat washing itself languorously? Clearly whoever lives next door has a generous spirit as well as the three dead cars axle-deep in wildflowers.

As the shadows deepen, the sea grows dark and the sharpening breath from the sea sweeps through the town. A curl of smoke rises from a brick chimney on the other side of Reed Street, and I fight the temptation to associate the smoke with all the comforts of a home; where I live we’re not allowed open fires any more.

I turn to writing emails, feeling the privilege of dealing with words in the home town of Janet Frame, word-smith of genius. ‘In my family words were revered as instruments of magic,’ she wrote. On the way home this afternoon I detoured to Eden Street to look at her cottage from the road (it’s the wrong season for a guided tour) looking in vain for something of her own magic in its pleasant conventional façade; but then I remembered she always kept a part of herself hidden. Someone honours her by tending the garden; perhaps they were once neighbours.

The pearly evening light by the large window is enough to read by, until the street lamps melt into life across the town and take up their watch over the wide and largely deserted streets. I close my laptop and walk barefoot through the shadowy house to the bedroom, without turning on lights that would scatter the comfort of darkness.

I leave the curtains of the great seaward window open—to the deserted streets, the shadowy houses and gardens, and to the invisible sea beyond.

ABOUT THE WRITER: Jane Carswell is the author of Under the Huang Jiao Tree: Two Journeys in China, which was winner of the 2010 Whitcoulls Travel Book of the Year award and shortlisted for the 2010 Ashton Wylie Book Award. She writes at present mainly in the memoir and short story genres, and is a manuscript assessor, too. Find out more at www.janecarswell.net.

‘Light from the Sea’ was written for the Memoir & Local History Competition 2011, run annually by the New Zealand Society of Authors Bay of Plenty Region with support from Tauranga Writers, and was awarded 2nd Prize by judges Susan Brocker and Tommy Kapai Wilson.